Ashley M’s near-death experience

It was nearly 28 years ago when I had my near death experience. I was twelve years old and in junior high school. I had an accident at a school function, and was accidentally hung by a rope around my neck. I was alone at the time of the accident, and I remember looking for something to stand on to pull myself up. I was frantic! 

Then I remember looking at myself from an outside perspective. The next thing I saw was a bright loving light. It looked like a million light bulbs close together, forming one huge, loving light. I went towards it and was pulled through to a place where I remember feeling peace and love beyond measure. I was then welcomed by so many people I knew and loved! Some were people I knew only in heaven before coming to earth. The love and happiness was so strong! I don't remember seeing bodies, only energies or auras. We communicated telepathically. They were surprised I was there so soon. Then I was shown to a spirit guide who led me to a building that had Greek columns out front. It was a massive building.

 
Then I was brought to a room full of other people and their spirit guides. Each of us were standing around something like a circular table. It had a dome in the center of the table. I looked into the dome and started my life review. I could witness and experience my life from many different perspectives. I felt what others felt from my actions from their point of view. It was hard to go through, but I knew it was to learn and grow from my time on earth. I remember hearing others cry, laugh, and other things because of what they did on Earth. My spirit guide told me it was okay, and that we are all loved; that this was not a judgment. I was told that we all learn best by experiencing it ourselves. God does not judge us. We are all learning beings. The hardest of part of judgment comes from feeling our lives from so many different perspectives. I could take as long as I wanted because this review was to learn and gain empathy.

Then, I was taken to a room where the energies that had a really hard time with the life review were put to sleep to recover and heal. They were surrounded by a loving white light. I was shown a place where everyone has a pre-set life on record, chosen by us. I was shown my life path. Reincarnation is real, but it is our choice to incarnate. We do so to learn and grow. God is Love. We are sent to Earth to love and be loved unconditionally. Heaven looks just like Earth and is unbelievably beautiful. I could travel anywhere just by thinking about it. Time doesn't exist in heaven. We are all beautifully and wonderfully made. The image of God is the emotion/energy of Love.

I was then told that I would need to come back to Earth. I didn't want to come back and I fought it. But, I was told my mission was to speak to the world about my experience and to teach that God is love and our purpose here is to show love and kindness to everyone. Heaven is REAL.

The next thing I knew, I was on the ground being given CPR. For months later, I remember being depressed because I wanted to go back. I have only shared this experience with a handful of people. However, I am feeling the pull to share my story. It is difficult because I am a teacher, and I live in a very conservative area. Many of the things I experienced even go against my Christian religion. I do not hold all the answers. I believe that there is a God, and I cannot deny the existence of Heaven.

I believe that whatever I believe, that if it resonates with me, helps demonstrates love to others, and gives me peace, then that is my truth. I can have bits and pieces of what I personally experienced in a NDE and still find peace going to church or hiking in the mountains etc. It is my connection to God's Love that matters.

I have been highly sensitive to iridescent lights and loud sounds since my NDE. I also find myself to be highly empathic, and it seems all my senses were extremely heightened since this experience. I'm not sure why I remember so much from my NDE. I feel blessed to not fear death. I know we are all here for a purpose. I am more aware of my actions and behavior towards others. I try to show kindness and love to others. Life is a constant work in progress. I know that God is Love and Heaven is real. I hope this gives some of you comfort. Thank you for letting me share.

 

Posted at NDERF.org

NDERF.org report translated from French

I was 16 years old and born into a practicing, Catholic family. On Saturday in January 1982, I was walking to church to attend mass. I was very disappointed to not be allowed to go to a dance party with a friend. I had just left her house, saying this prayer inwardly, 'Lord, you see what this sacrifice is costing me, make it at least so that it’s not in vain!' 

I crossed a bridge and came to an intersection, where I entered the crosswalk. The last image I saw was the horrified face of the driver in the car. Simultaneously, I heard a terrifying sound of brakes. I told myself, 'I'm going to die!'

I flew over the vehicle, and was dragged under the wheels of the car behind that one. At that moment, I saw the scene from above, in 360° spherical vision but without realizing that this scene was about me. I saw disturbed onlookers, a crowd, and heard the shouts and howls.

I was thinking, 'Why are they getting disturbed?' Then I moved and saw my parents run up to the bridge. I said to myself, 'Why is Mum in slippers? She looks distraught; there's something bad going on. Oh, hey, there's a wrecked car and some feet sticking out…” Then I saw a young man I knew who was watching.

I was able to tell him afterwards that I knew he was there on that day and I acurately described how he was dressed.

I was then suddenly sucked into a luminous tunnel. I saw an immense light. I moved toward the light, feeling intense Happiness and a fullness and peace I had never known. I felt my soul expand such that it felt like it encompassed the whole universe. It was wonderful as I was bathed in universal love. There were multitudes of people, but I couldn't see any faces. Instead, I 'felt' them. All my senses were heightened in an extraordinary way.

At that moment, I never wanted to go back or to leave this Happiness. Then a magnificent lady, who was dressed in a luminous, white dress, was standing in front of this great halo of light. I was sucked into this light. This woman was very beautiful, but above all because of the kindness that I saw in her smile and the way she looked at me. I knew I was loved. I thought then that it was my grandmother who had passed away shortly before this experience. She seemed to be fully listening to the person behind her whom I call 'the luminous star'. I wanted to move forward, but she stopped me by waving me back. It was a very painful rejection that stayed with me for several years. I insisted, without using words, that I wanted to stay with her. Words weren't necessary. She listened to the luminous star who seemed to speak to her but I couldn't hear it. Then she told me, 'You still have things to do on Earth; you must go back.'

Then I saw, as in a kaleidoscope, a kind of flashback movie showing all the moments of my life where I had not loved enough. There were some very concrete situations, but I can't remember exactly. What I remember is that all of those moments were like hot mud thrown in my face. It was very painful, so I begged God to stop this torture. I made a last prayer in what I thought was the Kingdom of the dead, 'If you save my life, I promise to make up for all these moments and to love more.'

I opened my eyes and saw the stretcher-bearers place me in the vacuum mattress. I was dazed and didn't speak. The police and firefighters told me that I should have died under the circumstances. They couldn't believe that I only had a few broken bones, bruises, and head trauma.

For two years, I had nightmares upon hearing the sound of the brakes. But each time, like a reassuring hand, the memory of the lady soothed me. Then I wrote a note to my mother who told me that from what I had written her, she thought that I had seen not my grandmother but the Virgin Mary. I couldn't tell anyone else, as I feared that I would be mocked, except I did tell my husband ten years later.

This brief moment of a few seconds is unforgettable. It helped me greatly in the following years to endure significantly painful ordeals. I had another serious accident that resulted in multiple transplant operations and one year of rehabilitation. I experienced the loss of our first baby. I had two acute pancreatitis attacks two years apart during the period of post-partum. I had several hospitalizations in intensive care. I have experienced five births and the departure of my grandfather, and then of my father.

Before this experience, my life was a black and white movie. Afterwards, it was a movie in color.

Each encounter and the words of the gospel, took an unexpected meaning in light of this experience. My faith was strengthened. I even thought I was called to religious life. Then I met my husband who also had an intense inner life.

I understood that we would be judged on Love (as St John of the Cross says) and that our life is only a trivial passage, but especially it is not real Life. True Life is blissful eternity, but we can begin to live this eternity right now. As I understood a few years later, it is no longer necessary to die to know or relive this experience: by loving here on earth, we explore the Heaven of our soul and live the communion of Saints in the anticipation of the Kingdom of God.

Physicists argue that mind is One and we are too

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey refers to arguments in The Miracle of Existence, written by Henry Margenau (1901-1997) when he was Professor Emeritus of physics and Natural Philosophy at Yale University. “For Margenau, the fact that we perceive the same world is evidence for the existence of the Universal Mind. Granted, everyone’s vision of things is not precisely identical, a fact that is amply documented by decades of experiments in perceptual psychology. Yet there is a rough equivalence between our visions that no one can doubt; we can communicate shared experiences about our world without too much difficulty. Now, what are we to make of the fact that we collectively share a coherent picture of the world? This fact is profoundly important, says Margenau. After we take in incoming stimuli, they are finally combined into a ‘physical reality, in essence the same for all.’ And this ‘oneness of the all implies the universality of mind if we remember that matter is a construct of the mind.’

“This significant possibility,” Dossey writes, “is overlooked consistently by perceptual psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers of the mind. If, as modern neuroscience agrees, we know nothing except through the senses, then why is there not a different world for each brain? Brains are not alike even in identical twins. And the same brain, from one moment to the next, can perceive the same stimuli in a different way, and make a different world picture. When we consider how radically different the pictures that our brains make could be, it is astonishing that our world pictures turn out to be as coherent as they are.

“And the reason they are coherent, Margenau implies, is not because our brains are similar or work the same, but because our minds are one. It takes a single consciousness to make a single picture of the world, especially when that world picture is being assembled by all the brains on the planet. Only the One Mind, a Universal Mind, could do such a thing. To perform in such a way it must be nonlocal in the sense of being beyond individual brains and bodies. If the One Mind were not at work shaping the vast amount of sensory data processed every moment by the sea of brains on the Earth, we might expect world pictures to be formed that are so disparate as to be incommunicable.

Dossey notes: “Some counter that the pictures we make of the world are one because there is only one world to make the picture from. This view is that of naïve realism, and Margenau and modern physics in general ask us to go beyond it, for there is really no ‘out there’ that we can regard as totally external, objective, and the same for everyone. There is an aspect of reality that is deeper than the ‘outside’ objects, and must include the mind. Ultimately this is the reality of the One, the Universal Mind, which in its most comprehensive expression is God."

Philosopher Ken Wilber concludes: “each individual is part of God or part of the Universal Mind. I use the phrase ‘part of’ with hesitation, recalling its looseness and inapplicability even in recent physics. Perhaps a better way to put the matter is to say that each of us is the Universal Mind but inflicted with limitations that obscure all but a tiny fraction of its aspects and properties.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 154-161.

I'm Going Home on the Morning Train

 

A spiritual composed and sung during slavery.

I’m going home on the morning train.

I’m going home, on the morning train.

I’m going home. I’m going home.

I’m going home on the morning train.

On my way, to the freedom land.

On my way, to the freedom land.

I’m going  home. I’m going  home.

On my way, to the freedom land.

 

No more troubles, now they’re gone.

No more struggles, my time has come.

I’m going home. I’m going home.

I’m going home on the morning train.

 

The McDonald Sisters - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gox3_GREz_c

Peter, Paul and Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHzfboDYUc

An experiment verifies prayer helps healing

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey writes: “Most people today believe that in science there is no place for prayer. Perhaps this idea is a holdover from some three centuries ago, when ‘action at a distance’ was deplored by the best minds. Galileo condemned Johannes Kepler’s views on gravity as ‘the ravings of a madman’ when the latter proposed that invisible forces from the moon, acting across gigantic distances, were causing the earth’s tides.

“Obviously the modern mind has sided with Kepler,” Dossey writes, “by accepting the action at a distance that is gravitation, but we have not been so generous in our attitude toward prayer. However, in perhaps the most rigidly controlled scientific study ever done on the effects of prayer, cardiologist Randolph Byrd, formerly a university of California professor, has shown that prayer works and that it can be a powerful force in healing.

“Byrd designed his study as ‘a scientific evaluation of what God is doing.’ Dossey explains: “During his ten-month study a computer assigned 393 patients admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital either to a group that was prayed for by home prayer groups (192 patients) or to a group that was not remembered in prayer (201 patients). The study was designed according to the most rigid criteria that can be used in clinical studies in medicine, meaning that it was a randomized, prospective, double blind experiment in which neither the patients, nurses, nor doctors knew which group the patients were in. He recruited Roman Catholic groups and Protestant groups around the country to pray for members of the designated group. The prayer groups were given the names of their patients, something of their condition, and were asked to pray each day, but were given no instructions on how to pray.”

“The results were striking. The prayed-for patients differed from the others remarkably in several areas:

1. They were five times less likely than the unremembered group to require antibiotics (three patients compared to sixteen patients).

2. They were three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid as a consequence of the failure of the heart to pump properly (six compared to eighteen patients).

3. None of the prayer-for group required endotracheal intubation, in which an artificial airway is inserted in the throat and attached to a mechanical ventilator, while twelve in the unremembered group required mechanical ventilator support.

4. Fewer patients in the prayed-for group died (although the difference in this area was not statistically significant).

If the technique being studied had been a new drug or a surgical procedure instead of prayer, it would almost certainly have been heralded as some sort of ‘breakthrough.”

Dr. William Nolan, author of a book that criticizes faith healing, has acknowledged: “It sounds like this study will stand up to scrutiny.” Even suggesting, “maybe we doctors ought to be writing on our order sheets, Pray three times a day. If it works, it works.”

Dossey adds: “This rigorous study suggests that something about the mind allows it to intervene in the course of distant happenings, such as the clinical course of patients in a coronary care unit hundreds of thousands of miles away. In this prayer study the degree of spatial separation did not seem to matter.” And this fact “suggests that the effects of prayer do not behave like common forms of energy; that no ‘signal’ is involved when the mind communicates with another mind or a body at a distance.” In other words, no matter how those praying may conceive of their prayers “going somewhere”—to the patients or to God—there is no known energy that would explain prayer as actually moving from one place to another.

This “nonlocal’ characteristic of prayer should not be a surprise for anyone familiar with the major theistic religious traditions. For their teachings have never confined God to a particular place. Instead, God is everywhere, transcending space and time. In Dossey’s words, God “is nonlocal, an attribute shared by our own minds. Thus we can say without hesitation that something about us is divine.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 45-48.

Intuition, dreams, the unconscious, soul, God

Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul notes that: “Arthur Koestler stated in his monumental treatise on creativity, The Act of Creation, ‘Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.'” 

Is there any evidence to support this claim? The mathematician Jacques Hadamard in 1945 surveyed the most eminent mathematicians in America about their working methods. He concluded that most of the mathematicians “born or resident in America avoid not only the use of ‘mental words’ but even ‘the mental use of algebraic or other precise signs.” Instead, “The mental pictures [that they employ] are most frequently visual.”

Dossey says: “Perhaps the most astounding case is that of English physicist Michael Faraday, whom Einstein placed on a par with Newton. Faraday’s thinking was almost entirely visual, and strikingly devoid of mathematics. Indeed, he had neither a mathematical gift nor any formal training in mathematics, and he was ignorant of all but the simplest elements of arithmetic. Yet Faraday could see the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as curves in space, and he coined the phrase lines of force to describe them.”

Mozart described his composing as follows:

All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.

Dossey writes: “As a result of analyzing his own psychic life across decades, as well as treating thousands of patients and analyzing their dreams,” Jung concluded that humanity possesses “a definite psychic heredity. This consists of phenomena essential to life and which express themselves physically, just as other inherited characteristics express themselves physically. Among these are ‘psychic factors’ that are not confined to single persons, families, or races. These ‘universal dispositions of the mind’ are analogous to Plato’s forms or to logical categories that are everywhere present as basic postulates of reason—the difference being that they are categories of the imagination, not categories of reason. Following St. Augustine, Jung called them archetypes. They abound in the lives of everyone and take the form of familiar motifs—religious stories, myths, dreams, spontaneous fantasies, and visions. The unconscious layer of the psyche that is made up of these universal dynamic forms Jung called the collective unconscious.

“Jung found that the collective unconscious demonstrates the traits of nonlocal mind we have seen so far. It would not be pinned down in space and time, and it transcended the single self to envelop all minds.” Jung asserted that the unconscious “has its own time inasmuch as past, present, and future are blended together in it. Since all distinctions vanish in the unconscious,” Jung explained, “it is only logical that the distinction between separate minds should disappear too. Wherever there is a lowering of the conscious level we come across instances of unconscious identity.”

Jung wrote: “The two elements of time and space, indispensable for change, are relatively without importance for the psyche.” Yet, to know immortality we must realize that we are mortal. “This feeling for the infinite,” Jung maintained, “can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be unique [and therefore limited] we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!”

Our task in life, Jung asserted, is “to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” Only in this way can we realize “the sole purpose of human existence,” which Jung says is “to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Jung described human consciousness as “the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul.” Therefore, Dossey argues, by increasing our consciousness we recover the soul and regain “contact with the inner Divinity.” Today, however, this task is difficult for two reasons. First, science describes our lives as though souls don’t exist and asserts that the brain produces all our conscious experience. Second, religious teachings in the West generally reject the idea that the soul is “the radiant Godhead itself.”

Woman meditating "sees" white cysts on her ovary

Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul writes: “One bright Tuesday morning in early December, Elizabeth took a trip. She’d planned the journey for months, except for one important detail: she had intentionally never set a date for departure. Elizabeth wanted to let the trip happen on its own and knew she would understand when the time was right. This was the morning. Without ever leaving her house, Elizabeth traveled—into her body.

“It was not an aimless excursion. Elizabeth wanted to know the reasons behind the nagging pain she had been experiencing for several months in the lower left side of her abdomen. Always given somewhat to introspection, she was confident that she could find our the reason behind it—moreover, that it was indeed her rightful task to do so. This job did not belong to others, even to her doctors, except perhaps as confirmation of her own knowledge. She did not know where her certainty came from, but it was there: an unpretentious, inner awareness that she could know her own body’s ways.

“She sat in her favorite wingback chair in a sunny spot by the big bay windows in the living room and closed her eyes. Her feet resting solidly on the floor, palms down on the chair arms, she took several slow, deep breaths and let her mind be free. This state of consciousness was not new to Elizabeth; she had regularly engaged in deliberate relaxation techniques for a decade and could enter deep states of tranquility at will. As usual she adopted no particular mental strategy, but let her consciousness be blank. I already know everything I need to know, she said to herself; I only have to let the knowledge surface. So, allowing her mind to be empty, she waited.

“Images came: something multiple, circular, ovoid, now inside a larger object, itself seemingly spherical. Soft, white, three of them. Not angry, this triad, but calm and placid—something that belonged inside her and something that, strangely, seemed to own pain as a rightful expression of its being. Something unmistakably her.”

When Elizabeth came to see Dossey, she told him she didn’t have cancer but had three spots on her left ovary. Dossey writes: “Something about this woman was extraordinary. She had a presence that commanded great respect. She was delivering what for her was a simple, honest statement of fact.” A sonogram revealed three cystic lesions on Elizabeth’s left ovary, each appearing white. An operation confirmed that these lesions were benign, but they were removed and that ended Elizabeth’s pain.

Dossey concludes: “If cases like Elizabeth’s were rare, perhaps they would deserve no more than a raised eyebrow. But they aren’t. Medicine is thickly littered with similar examples showing that the mind’s range is beyond the brain. Frequently it appears that an illness or a crisis with one’s health is the key that turns on nonlocal ways of knowing . . . freeing the mind to behave nonlocally in space and time.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 19-23.